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DJOKO MURDJATMOJO

JAKARTA. — An AirAsia passenger jet carrying 162 people lost contact with Indonesian air traffic control early yesterday, gripping Southeast Asia with a second missing plane crisis in less than a year.

The search operation for the missing AirAsia Flight QZ8501 was halted for the night, but big ships won’t return to shore and will leave their searchlights on, according to the Indonesian Transportation Ministry.

Before communication was lost, one of the pilots asked to fly at a higher altitude because of bad weather, officials said.

The aircraft, flying from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore, went missing as it flew at 38 000 feet over the Java Sea between the islands of Belitung and Borneo – a heavily travelled shipping channel with shallow waters, according to Indonesian authorities, who are leading the search and rescue operations.

“The plane has lost contact at 6:17am local time,” the Indonesian Transportation Ministry’s acting director-general for air transportation affairs, Djoko Murdjatmojo, said. The aircraft disappeared from radar observations at 6:18am, he said, and air traffic control officers monitored the presence of the plane until 7:55am.

Of the people on board the Airbus A320-200, 155 are Indonesian, three are South Korean, one is British, one is French, one is Malaysian and one is Singaporean, the airline said.

Seventeen children, including one infant, are among the passengers, the carrier said. Seven of the people on board are crew members.

At the airport in Surabaya, loved ones gathered and wept as they waited for any word on the passengers.

Some took cellphone pictures of a flight manifest posted on a wall. The black-and-white papers showed every passenger’s name and seat number, but not their fate.

Others simply sat and dabbed tears from their eyes.

“Thank you for all your thoughts and prayers. We must stay strong,” AirAsia Chief Executive Tony Fernandes said on Twitter, adding that this is his worst nightmare. He travelled to Surabaya, where most of the passengers are from.

As word spread of the missing plane, the airline changed the colour of its logo on its website and social media accounts from red to gray.

Pope Francis prayed for the missing, according to Vatican Radio.

Flight 8501 “was requesting deviation due to en route weather before communication with the aircraft was lost,” the airline said.

The flight’s captain asked permission to climb to a higher altitude, Murdjatmojo said, according to the national news agency.

According to flight tracking websites, almost the entire flight path of the plane was over the sea.

Bad weather gripped the region at the time, CNN meteorologist Derek Van Dam said.

“We still had lines of very heavy thunderstorms” when the plane was flying, Van Dam said.

“But keep in mind, turbulence doesn’t necessarily bring down airplanes.”

CNN aviation analyst Mary Schiavo said that if there was an on-board emergency, the pilots should have issued a mayday call or a pan-pan call.

“Mayday means you’re immediately in danger of losing the flight; pan-pan means that it is urgent but that you can continue the flight and request an alternate route or an alternate airport,” said Schiavo, a former inspector general for the US Department of Transportation.

“It’s disconcerting in that the standard procedures for an emergency don’t seem to have been deployed,” she said.

Bad weather in the area is also likely to hamper the search efforts for the aircraft, said Alan Diehl, a former US air accident investigator.

The Malaysian government said it had deployed three vessels and three aircraft to help Indonesian authorities in the search for the plane. Singapore said it had activated its rescue and aviation agencies.

Australia and India said they had also offered assistance.

AirAsia is a Malaysia-based airline that is popular in the region as a budget carrier. It has about 100 destinations, with affiliate companies in several Asian countries.

The missing plane is operated by AirAsia’s Indonesian affiliate, in which the Malaysian company holds a 48.9 percent stake, according to its website.

AirAsia has a “very good” reputation for safety, CNN aviation correspondent Richard Quest said.

Flight 8501’s captain has a total of 6 100 flying hours, and the first officer a total of 2,275 flying hours, the airline said. The plane’s last scheduled maintenance was on November 16, it said.

The French Foreign Ministry said the first officer is the French citizen who is on the plane. A state-run company in Indonesia that manages airports identified the first officer as Remi Emmanuel Plesel.

Airbus said the plane had “accumulated approximately 23 000 flight hours in some 13 600 flights.” The aircraft manufacturer said it would provide full assistance to authorities in charge of investigating the missing plane.

The loss of contact with the AirAsia plane comes nearly 10 months after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which dropped off radar over Southeast Asia on March 8 with 239 people on board.

The Malaysia Airlines plane, a Boeing 777-200ER, lost contact with air traffic control over the South China Sea between Malaysia and Vietnam.

Searchers have yet to find any debris from Flight 370, which officials believe crashed in the southern Indian Ocean after veering dramatically off course.

But some aviation experts don’t think the search for Flight 8501 will be as grueling as the search for MH370.

“We are not talking about the deep Indian Ocean here,” Quest said.

“We are talking about congested airspace around Southeast Asia.” — CNN.